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Study will look at depot's economic effect

The Associated Press

Posted:
09/09/2012 07:03:28 AM MDT

Updated:
09/09/2012 09:18:01 AM MDT

RICHMOND, Ky.—Officials in a central Kentucky city that is home to one of the country's two last remaining chemical weapons destruction facilities have received a grant to work on a plan that could keep the plant open once its mission is complete.

The Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet is spending $120,000 to launch a three-part study to look at the economic impact of the Blue Grass Army Depot.

The plant, now under construction, will destroy 523 tons of chemical weapons at the site south of Richmond. Destruction of the weapons is scheduled to start in 2020 and will be finished in 2023.

The Lexington Herald-Leader and The Richmond Register reported this week on a meeting in Richmond in which Madison County officials announced the study.

Former state representative Harry Moberly, a member of the Chemical Destruction Community Advisory Board, said he wanted to be sure the depot is not shut down by the federal government in the future.

"We need to have some opportunities on line before the job is finally accomplished," he said. "This is the biggest economic development project that's ever come to Madison County."

The study will look at how the weapons disposal plant influences the local and regional economy. Blue Grass Army Depot currently supports the second-highest average employee wages in the region, bested only by the Toyota plant in Scott County.

"You can read stories in the newspaper in places like Anniston (Ala.) and elsewhere. Headlines read, '900 workers to be laid off.' We're not going to do that here. There will be about $1 billion worth of infrastructure remaining. There also will be hundreds of workers, many of them highly skilled. We want to start now to find out how we can keep as many of them here as we possibly can."

Contracted consultants and employees with Blue Grass Area Development District will do the study, which will be completed in July 2013. Two additional phases might take two to three more years to finish and would cost an additional $380,000. The funding sources for those phases have not been identified.

Officials said the study's cost is a fraction of the dollars brought into the community through payroll. So far, the chemical weapons project has pumped $348 million in payroll into the community. The construction of the plant now employs 977 people, including 916 in Richmond and 61 fabricating special equipment in California, Maryland, Ohio and Washington state.

The study will not look at the impact of possibly losing 310 jobs at the depot, which also stores and moves conventional weapons. Depot employees were told in July that the winding down of U.S. military operations in the Middle East reduced the demand for depot materials and could lead to layoffs beginning in mid-2013.

The Department of Defense has made no decision regarding those jobs, said Col. Brian Rogers, commanding officer of the depot.

The chemical weapons at the depot are stored on 250 acres of the 15,000-acre site. Blue Grass, the smallest of nine storage sites, has only 2 percent of the nation's original chemical stockpile.

Stockpiles have been destroyed in Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Utah and in the Johnson Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Pueblo, Colo., and Madison County are the only remaining sites. Kentucky was always scheduled to be last because it contained the smallest amount of weapons.

Other weapons-destruction sites in Anniston; Tooele, Utah; and Pine Bluff, Ark., have seen workforce reductions in recent years as they completed the elimination of chemical weapons.

Mendi Goble, executive director of the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, said she had heard former demilitarization sites referred to as "ghost towns."

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